Week 1

Lecture 1 (9/30)

Ralph Ellison: novel bound up with nationhood
- What/who are we?
- What has been the experience of this particular group?
- How did it become this way?
- What stops us from attaining the ideal?
American writers + artists always return to question of our national collectivity -> successes / failures
American flag is abstraction + symbol
Same painting, over and over again, different meaning/symbol
w/ rise of democracy in US, slavery happened in parallel -> cannot talk about one without the other
Use example of Asian American literature as entryway toward understanding larger American / minority literature
Otherness: radical difference -> Asian is always "foreigner", "strange", "grotesque"
- Asians come to US for labor shortage (railroads, etc)
- Perceived through 19th century and further as radically different
Assimilation: American promise of leaving behind "tradition" -> "modern life"
- Theoretical concept -> trickle into daily lives
W.E.B. DuBois -> "the problem of the color life" + "double consciousness"
- Most useful metaphor: double consciousness
Double consciousness -> hybridity: rethinking from two different distinct selves -> combination / overlapping "hybrid consciousness"
Does the arc of history bend toward progress?
On style: how do stylistic decisions (by writers) shape their thematic arguments?
- Leave things out, emphasize, etc
On realism, modernism, postmodernism
Next: read Erika Lee